['Stephenville native Sherry White, a cinema and television writer, is seen in this handout photo.']

Sherry White is excited to see what general movie-going audience members will think of “Maudie,” the feature film she wrote about renowned Canadian folk artist Maud Lewis shot in Newfoundland last year.

“Maudie” opened Friday in Halifax, Toronto, Ottawa and Vancouver. The film expands on April 21 to Edmonton, Calgary, Montreal, Victoria and Winnipeg and other cities throughout the spring.

White, a native of Stephenville, said the movie has already received a good response at film festivals where it was featured.

In a telephone interview from Los Angeles where she is working on a new television series entitled “Ten Days in the Valley,” she said Maudie was actually a decade in the making as she started writing it back in 2004 and it’s been in development for a number of years.

White said it took a long time to get the pieces together, including the cast and directors. She said Sally Hawkins did an amazing job portraying Maud and Ethan Hawke, who played Everett, was fantastic.

“I’ve been watching Ethan Hawke movies since I was young, so that’s really cool that he acted in the feature film I wrote,” she said.

White was busy on other television projects she’s working on, so she couldn’t be around for any of the “Maudie” filming.

“As a writer I’ve kind of moved on to other projects, but still want the feature films to get made. It’s kind of like a career bubbling on the side,” she said.

She was spending a lot of time in Los Angeles while “Maudie” was being made and this past weekend was in Dallas with her son Percy Hynes-White, who is involved in the shooting of the new “X-Men” pilot for Fox.

White said Percy is really into acting but as his mom she tries to keep his work limited so he can focus on school.

The new series that she’s one of the writers for – “Ten Days in the Valley” — stars Kyra Sedgwick, who is best known for her starring role as Deputy Chief Brenda Leigh Johnson on the TNT crime drama The Closer.

In the new 10-episode season, expected to air on ABC sometime in the fall, the plot focuses on a television producer's life getting complicated after her young daughter disappears in the middle of the night and the two worlds she tries to navigate violently collide.

White will be returning to Newfoundland this summer working on the third season of “Frontier.” She will be doing another project in the province that she can’t speak about yet, but will be made public in the coming weeks.

“It’s great getting back to Newfoundland to work when I can and bringing Percy back. My work is much more global now, but it’s always nice to go back to my roots,” she said.